Exploring the Crossroads of Art, Craft, Reading, and Creative Writing with Alisa Golden

Monday, August 22, 2011

Resharpening Cutting-Edge Art

Seeing the sepia-toned, collage-style wallpaper in the coffee store made me put down my hot chocolate for a moment. I loved it (both the drink and the wallpaper). From what I remember—this was a few years ago—the topics were postage and travel. The aesthetics were pleasing. Well, that ends that, I thought at the time. Can't make sepia-toned collage work anymore if it's showing up in a chain.

So it goes and maybe it's natural. Over and over artists move into ghost towns or low-rent districts, fix 'em up, do exciting things and…there goes the neighborhood. Expensive lofts are built advertising the arty feel, rents go up, artists are forced out. Art is parallel with life here. Artists create something, it's picked up by commercial media, splashed about willy nilly, and suddenly it's a cliché. The real cutting edge becomes a dull prop.

Is this, consciously or unconsciously, why some artists guard their "secret formulas?" I don't hear it often because those aren't the circles I chase around, but I have heard the response to the question, "How did you do that?" to be "I'm not sayin'." I see why they might conceal their methods, but I've always felt that sharing information is the best way to make it available for the right person to grab hold of it and do something terrific. Sometimes I'm just as satisfied to learn, share things as I learn or figure out, and move on.

But if I—you—they—didn't? Would the vibrant, new, cutting edge art hang on a little longer? Well, just look at that sentence again. Cutting edge can't exist forever. If we must hold onto the metaphor, a knife, even a great knife, always needs resharpening. So that is our task: to continue resharpening ourselves, our outlooks, our art so that it stays fresh and meaningful and inspiring.

3 comments:

I agree - I think if your art relies on a guarded technique in order to make it 'special' - then it's inevitable you're only going to be 'special' for a short while..... whereas if you share what you know, both you and your work have the opportunity to not only create wonderful work - but wonderful connections also...

Thank you for all your sharings. I have your books and rely on them for inspiration and instruction. Your comments above about the "cutting edge" are very insightful. May I refer to them on my blog? I feel as you do, that the sharing will always come back to you in generous harvest, even if "freeloaders" are always out there. The only thing we can really say we own outright are our mistakes. The rest comes to us from others

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About Me

Alisa Golden is the author of Making Handmade Books: 100+ Bindings, Structures & Forms (Lark Crafts, 2011), and Painted Paper: Techniques & Projects for Handmade Books & Cards (Lark Books, 2008), among others. She makes books under the imprint never mind the press and teaches bookmaking and letterpress printing at California College of the Arts. She holds a BFA in printmaking from California College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA), and an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Her stories, poems, and art have been published widely, and she founded and edits the online and print magazine, Star 82 Review.

Golden is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. Earned fees are recycled back into books reviewed for blog posts.